Books: A Tale of Time and the River THE DAY OF CREATION

The best place to look for most of J.G. Ballard's 20-odd books is still in the paperback racks displaying science fiction, somewhere between Asimov and Bradbury. But the popular success of Ballard's Empire of the Sun (1984), an autobiographical novel about an English boy's coming of age in Shanghai during the World War II Japanese occupation, was followed last year by Steven Spielberg's acclaimed screen adaptation. Thanks to this double-barreled triumph, Ballard has been transformed from a well-kept cult secret into something resembling a household name, with the luxury and burden of knowing that his next book would generate widespread curiosity among a general audience. The Day of Creation, his eleventh novel, has finally arrived, and no fans, old or new, are likely to be disappointed.

But few will agree on what they are enjoying. Ballard is a master of hard- edged hallucinations, of improbable scenes so vivid that they enter the subconscious without checking in first at the front desk of reason. Reading him seems like dreaming, and interpretations of meaning tend to be resented as invasions of privacy. So it is here. There is an old-fashioned adventure tale going on, along with a peculiar love story, a mythic quest, a laborious fertility rite and a perilous journey of psychological discovery. And that is only for openers.

Dr. Mallory, the narrator, is an Englishman working for the World Health Organization in the arid northern province of a former French colony "in the dead heart of the African continent, a land as close to nowhere as the planet could provide." The southward creep of the Sahara and the drying up of nearby Lake Kotto have driven most of the native residents away, leaving the physician with hardly anyone to treat but General Harare and his ragtag band of Marxist guerrillas. But these rebel patients do not trust Mallory, because he has conceived a scheme to drill the dry lake bed and tap into a potential third Nile, which will turn the parched land green and fruitful. Such a happy result would bring credit and profit to the government in power, so one morning Harare and his men take Mallory down to the former lakefront to shoot him. The doctor is saved by the arrival of a plane bearing Captain Kagwa, the provincial police chief, and Professor Sanger, a maker of television documentaries.

Sanger has come to publicize himself giving rice to the starving natives. Mallory replies, "One problem is that the people here don't eat rice . . . The second is that there aren't any people." Sanger, whose career is on the skids, responds glumly, "Even my disaster area is a disaster." Then something amazing occurs. A tractor under Mallory's direction tips over the huge stump of an old oak tree, and water begins to bubble up from the cavity below. First a trickle, then a stream. Soon a broad brown current several hundred yards wide spreads itself north and south. Knowing a dramatic photo opportunity when he sees one, Sanger revises his plans and sets out to videotape the birth of the River Mallory.